I remember an Ohio case not long ago in which a court found a woman guilty of obstructing a police officer in the performance of his duties. She was feeding parking meters for other motorists just ahead of the officer writing tickets. It seemed to turn on the fact that he’d told her to stop but she kept doing it, in defiance of his order.
Some communities prohibit feeding any meter but your own, IIRC. Is there anything wrong with popping a dime in the meter of someone who would otherwise get a ticket? Isn’t that the kind of “random act of kindness” we’d want to encourage, as a society?
I was the beneficiary of a similar gesture: It was in a parking lot where you park first then purchase a ticket from the vending machine to display on your dash. I always hate parking here because you have to pay for a minimum of two hours but usually only need 15 minutes. This time, though, there was a ticket that had been partially stuffed back into the dispensing slot with an hour left on it! I’ve made it a point to do this myself from now on.
Even better: I just heard on the radio this morning that some people, receive free coffee through the drive-through. Someone up ahead paid for their own coffee with a $20 saying, “Keep paying for everyone’s orders until it runs out.”
However, I’d like to make two points:
One, I could see it being a problem if someone was feeding meters after they had expired but before the cop could write a ticket. I don’t know if this was the case with the woman described in the OP, but that is essentially destroying evidence of a crime.
Two, it generates income for the city. That’s why you (or I, at least) commonly see speed limits decreased, but rarely if ever increased. So if we encourage people to help each other out with parking tickets, then the city is just going to raise taxes to generate that revenue instead. So in the end, you aren’t really sticking it to the man, you’re just spreading the cost out a little more.
Well, keep in mind that one of the purposes of parking meters is to set a limit on how long any one vehicle can occupy any one spot. That’s why some parking meters only go up to 30 minutes, others 2 hours, others 5 hours, etc. In an area designed for lots of people to come, do their business fairly quickly, and leave so someone else can have the spot, they don’t want one person hogging the same spot all day.
So, re-feeding someone’s meter so they won’t get a ticket isn’t necessarily a kindness toward all the other people who want to park there but can’t find an available spot.
In some cities I’ve lived it is the law that the max time on the meter is the max time you are allowed to park. If you want to park longer you have to actually move your car, not just feed the meter. They have the “meter maid” marking cars and making sure this happens. You feed the meter and don’t move your car, you are issued a ticket for illegal parking. Broken meters are treated the same, they are not for unlimited free parking.
Most of the meters in Chicago say on them something like “Parking Limit 2 Hours”. So it’s not just the length of the meter that limits you - if you put in 4 quarters for 2 hours, you are not (technically) allowed to simply run out and feed more quarters in at 1 hour, 58 minutes. You cannot even get into your car, move it out of the spot, drive around the block and park in the same spot and feed the meter again, legally. You have to park in a different spot every two hours. Sometimes the cops will mark the tire of a car with chalk to see if it’s been moved since their last sweep, and even if your meter still has time on it, if it’s been more than two hours, you’ll get a ticket anyway - even if there are plenty of open parking spaces on the block!
Most of the time, “feeding the meters” as they run out is ignored (no matter who’s doing it), but once in a while you run into a total douchebag of a cop who makes you move your car.
ETA : dammit, that’s what I get for attending to a toddler in need before posting! Beaten to the point. Ah well. At least I can add that it’s happened to me, personally, and isn’t just an urban legend.
What about purposely over feeding the meter when you arrive so the next person gets it free? I have maxed out a meter, been in the store for 10-15 minutes and left. The next person who parks there won’t have to pay at all. Would I be guilty of the same crime?
Not AFAICT. The purpose of time-limited metered parking is to keep cars moving in and out reasonably promptly so that one car doesn’t hog the same parking spot for a long time. Your system, unlike repeated meter-feeding for a car that is hogging a parking spot, doesn’t interfere with this purpose in any way.
As long as there’s enough turnover of cars using the same parking spot during a given time, why should anybody care who’s actually paying the meter fees? What difference does it make whether everybody pays for his/her own meter use versus you paying all at once for yourself and five subsequent users?
Makes me want to go around cutting the heads off parking meters. Of course, I’d go to prison, but I’d fall in with a zany cast of characters, to whom I will endear myself by 1.) fighting the biggest, meanest one until I’m pert near brain-damaged and 2.) eating 50 hard boiled eggs.
Here in DC, the epicenter of parking enforcement nazi-ism, you can’t just move your car to another space after two hours; you have to move to a different street in a non-adjacent block, or you get one of those dog-dick pink pieces of paper they so zealously issue. Parking enforcement is the only DC govenrment function that is done with any competence.
As a small business owner, I have a problem when office workers don’t park in their assigned lots behind the building but stay all day in front of my store. That’s the whole point of meters, to allow for others to find a spot.
That “act of kindness” to one person may cost both me and my customers time and money.
My problem with it was when I worked at an office that didn’t *have *any parking anywhere but the meters in front. There was generally plenty of space at those meters, so I’d park at one of them. My boss never had a problem with it, as his customers had a dozen others to park at most of the time. But, as I was there all day, I did have to take frequent breaks to feed my meter, and occassionally longer breaks if a cop was feeling hardassed and made me move my car ahead 10 feet to the next meter. :rolleyes:
There is a company in Baltimore called IntelliPark that manufactures a parking meter with a built-in sonar sensor; when you vacate your parking space the meter resets itself. Pretty damned sneaky, I say.
Yeah, we have meters in Berkeley & Oakland that issue little paper slips that you put on your dashboard (with the time of expiration), so if you overpay, nobody reaps the benefit of your largesse except the city.
These high-tech measures seem silly to me. I’m sure it makes sense to bean counters to spend X dollars on high-tech equipment in order to net Y percentage of additional revenue, but when money is used for no other purpose than to obtain more money, it seems wrong. Let’s say, if I pay the city $5, and the city uses $1 of that $5 to buy technology that will get them an additional $2 from me, they’ve made an extra dollar, but have essentially wasted $1 of my money.
But it’s not really about revenue. It’s about making sure that places that need to have cars in and out during the course of the day can do so. If we didn’t have that around my office every visitor would have to go 1/4 mile away and park in the parking garage.
Agreed. The city of Williamsport PA attempted an experiment in the 80s to allow cars to park for free for 2 hours. They were trying to bring more people into the city. They wanted the cars that were there all day to park on parking lots and leave the streets open for business’ customers. In the end the experiment was a failure but the goal was as you say.
I suspect the real motivation behind parking meters is to actually generate revenue through ticketing. The fines, at least in Cambridge and Boston, are not so great that occasionally one says, “sod it,” and risks getting a ticket. The tickets don’t deduct points from one’s driving record.
I’ve wanted to do that (also with tolls) but I’m afraid the cashier will say, “Sure thing, ma’am” and pocket the money and charge everyone behind me anyway.
I guess if you can afford to live in Boston then the ticket is just the cost of everyday living.
I suspect it’s a little of both. Using a meter to encourage turn-around time is a short-term solution to a long term problem. Businesses generate taxes for cities so the problem is a shortage of parking spaces. Suburban malls offer free parking and are nothing but enclosed cities. Once inside you can shop uninterrupted, have your car worked on, and eat your meals without the hassle of parking meters or the threat of rain. Cities benefit when they recognize the need for low cost/convenient parking. Cities that don’t are the driving force behind new malls. It’s really just that simple.
Cars represent personal freedom and if I get a nonsense ticket then I take my money elsewhere. The last ticket I got, the judge was very polite and agreed with me that the speed was set too low. He waived court costs and I was on my way. But since I had to take a 1/2 day off and shell out $30 for 2 extra points on my license I use my power of choice to shop elsewhere. I even have a formula for it. I divide the cost of the ticket by half the state tax rate (I figure the city gets some of it back). In this case it equals $1,000. So for the next $2,000 of purchases I buy them outside the offending city. Yes, I realize it’s not a linear penalty but ultimately I hurt the tax base of the city by doing it. It’s my pound of flesh and it feels good.
